


Loss Ficlet: Bookcases

by missclairebelle



Series: Loss (Ficlets) [3]
Category: Outlander (TV), Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-17
Updated: 2018-03-17
Packaged: 2019-04-03 16:30:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14000094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missclairebelle/pseuds/missclairebelle
Summary: This is based in the same universe as the multi-part hurt/comfort fic Loss, but is in a different timeline than that story. I am going to do some stupid fluffy bits and bobs with this to fill in some of the angst of the other things I’m working on.





	Loss Ficlet: Bookcases

**Author's Note:**

> This is based in the same universe as the multi-part hurt/comfort fic Loss, but is in a different timeline than that story. I am going to do some stupid fluffy bits and bobs with this to fill in some of the angst of the other things I’m working on.

 

**Loss Ficlet: Bookcases**

Although he was a relatively light sleeper, Jamie Fraser snored when he slept. Not the entire time he slept – only for the first ten or fifteen minutes while he was on his back.  It was a soft but dense, low, fluttering at the back of his throat. It was punctuated by grunts as he got comfortable on his side. Once comfortable, usually pressed to me with a heavy arm draped over my waist or a hand on my breast. He breathed deeply, his lips slightly parted.

We had _actually slept_ in the same bed probably five times now. I no longer made a show of dressing and packing up my things. I just settled into the bed against him, sometimes wearing one of his well-worn t-shirts, and allowed myself to sleep.

I wondered what he looked like when he slept alone – sprawled across his King-sized bed like a starfish, hugging a pillow, confined to a slice of the bed (left, right, centered?), skewed to cut diagonal across his sheets?

I traced the pucker of a long, pale pink scar on the outside of his left thigh and wondered what happened to him. I could tell that whatever had caused the gash sliced deep, but the wound had healed well, probably without infection or complication. The margins of the scar indicated that some physician used sutures to close it, not staples and it was probably not surgical. I was unable to think of a surgical entry that would be required in the shape of the scar or heal as it had. Jamie had not stirred under my touch and I continued my exploration.

I carefully brought my hand up to trace what looked like an excision scar on his fifth true rib. It was bottle-cap sized and smooth in the center, jagged along the edges.

_How?_

It looked like the kind of deep wound that would have required antibiotics and sterile dressings periodically. He stirred a bit under my touch, sighing, his hands drifting in sleep to cup my ass and draw my body nearer.

Between his leg, ribs, and back, the man looked like he’d been to a war and barely made it out alive.

The feeling inside of me – _liking_ him, wondering if I could _love_ him – made my hands shake as I reached out to smooth back his hair.  He had drawn me back to his bed that first night we were together, dismissing a crude comment I had made about not marrying the woman you fuck when drunk. I felt a little crazy wondering if I could love him when so far our relationship had consisted of sex, takeout food, sex, sleeping, movies on the couch, sex, and more takeout on the weekends.  During the week we were committed only to some mild text flirtation revolving around meeting up for more of the same.

As carefully as possible I slithered out of Jamie’s grasp and watched his arms gather the pillow I had been using. It appeared to be an easy replacement for my body. He had told me that no one had slept in bed with him in over a year. I wondered if it was still too new for my absence to wake him from sleep – if having another person in his bed was so dream-like and foreign that I could have just as easily been a pillow.  

After pulling on my panties and feeling blindly in his closet for a sweatshirt I went to the kitchen. I drank a sparkling water and studied the photographs on his refrigerator. I had seen them all before but never had the opportunity to really study them.

A beautiful woman with a wide smile and sparkling eyes and jet black bobbed hair was hugging two small children – a boy (doe-like brown eyes, skinny but wide shouldered and no more than ten) and a girl (clear, slanted blue eyes and no older than five; no one needed to tell me the woman was her mother).  All three were laughing.  The children had smears of chocolate on their mouths and a giraffe loomed over them, a branch dangling out of its soft muzzle.  I looked down the hallway to the bedroom before taking the photograph off of the refrigerator and looking at the back. It was blank. I dismissed out of hand the ugly notion that it was Jamie’s wife and children. I put it back, left to wonder who they were.

The second picture was of Jamie in a tux with two other men.  All three were grinning. All were holding flutes of champagne and wore gold party hats. On the back of this photo, in neat, black, all capital letters:

_2011 memories:_

_1\. Survived NYE in NY with you, you cad;_

_2\. Got hitched;_

_3\. Got robbed on subway._

_You are the second best man in the world & the best man I could have asked to stand up for me. XX. JG-C & DG-C_

I carefully replaced the photograph and walked back down the hall. Jamie was snoring quietly on his back. He must have woken and fallen back to sleep immediately. I felt a pang when I realized that in waking he hadn’t called out to see if I was still in the flat.

Apparently emboldened by the photographs, I set about his apartment and violated his privacy in at least a hundred ways.  

I opened his medicine cabinet, holding my breath as the latch clicked free. I listened with static in my ears for Jamie to shift in bed, for the soft rhythm of his fluttering snore to hitch as he woke. It did not happen.  

The contents of his cabinet were all fairly innocuous.  Both straight and safety razors.  Shaving cream.  Crest toothpaste and mouthwash (I had used both; I did not need to make sure he did not use a disgusting flavor). Electric toothbrush.  Paracetamol.  A half-empty bottle of antibiotics prescribed the year before (probably a sinus infection, I mused based on the prescription; a few tablets clattered in the bottom when I shook it; I noted with a doctor’s consternation that Jamie was unable to follow clear instructions: TAKE YOUR ENTIRE PRESCRIPTION EVEN IF YOU ARE FEELING BETTER). A stack of small change. Alcohol wipes and bandages. Icy Hot. Condoms and a flavored lubricant (seal broken but none missing; I had never seen the lubricant before).

I had no reason to be jealous and I wasn’t. But it made me shut the cabinet nonetheless.

I retreated to the living room with slow, careful steps, as if I could lessen my weight by changing my usual walk.

I stood on my tiptoes and touched Jamie’s books. I whispered the titles and authors to myself.

T.S. Eliot ( _The Wasteland_ ). Charles Dickens ( _A Tale of Two Cities_ and _A Christmas Carol_ ).  William Shakespeare (more or less the complete works, even the awful ones like _Henry IV_ ). Alexandre Dumas ( _The Count of Monte Cristo_ in French and _The Three Musketeers_ in English).  Truman Capote ( _In Cold Blood_ ).  Roald Dahl ( _James and the Giant Peach_ ). Victor Hugo ( _Les Misérables_ in French).  

My heart skipped a little and I could not help my smile when my fingers ran over all seven Harry Potter books in hardcover, the jackets removed and stuffed between the shelf and the seventh book.

“Bored with me then?”

“ _Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ_ ,” I gasped as I jumped about a meter into the air and turned. I pulled the wrists of his sweatshirt down over my hands.

“Interestin’ turn of phrase.” He was _smirking_ at me.

I could feel myself blushing ferociously, the scarlet of my embarrassment burning under his sweatshirt and making its way slowly up my neck. It would be obvious to him in a moment. I breathlessly mumbled, “You scared the shit out of me! I couldn’t sleep; you were snoring.”

“Well ye made me very tired.” He was full out grinning at me now, his eyes widening for emphasis. “Ye ken ye just needta thump me on the chest if I’m makin’ noises.”

“Hmmmm,” I responded noncommittally, turning back to the bookshelf.  He stayed standing, sweatpants low on his hips, and leaned against the wall.

“So… are ye findin’ anythin’ interestin’, wanderin’ my around my flat and wearin’ my clothes, Sassenach?” He was leaning against the wall now, apparently taking a great enjoyment out of watching me squirm.  His lower lip was between his fingers and he was grinning like the cat who caught the canary.

“Yes. I’m judging you based on your choice in books.”

“Ye ken it’s a vulnerable thing, havin’ someone judge yer taste in literature.” He wasn’t wrong and I could tell that he was only half kidding.

“Well you _seem_ literate at least.” I turned back around and stutter-stepped towards him with a copy of _The Namesake_ in my hand. He seemed more than literate, he seemed well read and thoughtful in his choices. He liked classics; he liked a story with a hero; he liked a little bit of whimsy. 

I stopped a few feet from him, second-guessing my approach. I did not know him well enough to tell if he was annoyed with me or found my snooping around his living room charming.  I got my answer when he laughed at me and closed the distance himself. His arms around my waist and I wrapped my arms around his neck instinctively, almost like a reflex. 

“Forgive me?”

“Aye, though there’s nothin’ to forgive. I have a Kindle, too, if ye think ye needta snoop some more. And there’s always my medicine cabinet.” I flushed deeper, probably such a startling shade of red that he was able to tell that I had already between wrists-deep in his medicine cabinet.

“ _Harry Potter_?” I said, lifting my voice just enough to make it sound like a question. I was unable to help the sigh as his hands returned to the same position they’d been in when I left him alone in bed, resting on the curve of my ass just under the sweatshirt.

He broke the seal of his mouth along my neck to say, “Aye, what of it? I’m comfortable havin’ them. Who hasna read them?”

“ _I_ never finished _Harry Potter_.”

“What? How?” His brow furrowed. “J.K. Rowling is basically Scotland’s national treasure. Hell, she may be the treasure of the entirety of Britain. What do ye mean ye never _finished_?”

“I mean that I started them and only made it through the second book. I kept meaning to buy the third book. It didn’t happen and it’s been… I don’t know… some years now.”

He pulled back from me and went to the bookshelf, pulling the third book from the shelf and holding it in the air. “We fix that now, then. Ye’ll never be a Scot if ye dinna finish this, Sassenach.”  

For the rest of the night, Jamie read aloud to me, adding commentary about his favorite bits and how I should really pay attention because “ _this will be important later, Claire._ ” He ran his fingers through my hair as he read and ran his fingers along my collarbones and neck and the base of my throat where my skin dipped. We shifted positions every few chapters – my face resting at various points on his chest and then his belly and then my own arm laid out across a pillow, our legs tangled together. We stopped and lost ourselves in one another periodically, all slow hands and sloppy lips and whispers. The weight of his bedding over us shielded us from the outside world.  

We were far into the book when I dozed off over the low rumble of Jamie’s narration. I woke when he raised his voice and made it extra wispy for Professor Trelawney’s dialogue. He kissed me the top of my head when I asked him to read back a few pages so I could hear them again. He re-read the pages without complaint.

Shortly before dawn, he read a quiz to me from his phone to sort me into a house, something he declared “essential” to ascertaining our long-term compatibility.  My result was Ravenclaw, with equal parts Gryffindor and Slytherin rising. He had joked that he liked the fact that I was at least a little bit evil and then rolled on top of me, licking his thumb and allowing his hands to slip unabashedly into the pajama pants I had slipped on after our latest round.

“That’s a real Slytherin move,” I’d sighed as he touched me.  He hovered over my body and pinned my legs in place between his knees. I held his hand in against me through my pants while he finished his bidding.  

“Yeah, well I kent ye were a witch the moment ye corrected me about your surname. It was like ye put a spell on me,” he whispered, making me tumble over the edge against his hand with his lips on my throat.

I did not need the quiz to tell me that Jamie was a Gryffindor through and through.

Bleary-eyed and sleepy, we had said goodbye late that afternoon. Jamie kissed me lazily against the doorframe, holding up my weight and tugging my hair gently. “Tonight… what’re ye doin’?”

I fought the urge to be coy and just shrugged. “Laundry?”

“I want to go on a date. A real one where we get dressed up, I pick you up and I pay the check. Out on dry land, just clothed Claire and clothed me. Not too dressy.”

I suddenly realized that I’d spent more minutes in his presence naked and pressed against him than properly clothed. “Okay.” 

“And Claire?”

I had started to turn to walk away before he spoke and he caught me by the hand. I looked at him over the shoulder, my mouth going dry at the look he was giving me.

“Hmmmm?”

“We’ve got a lot more of _The Prisoner of Azkaban_ to go.”

I walked home with a foggy head filled with magic.

* * *


End file.
